Novel entitlements: Titles, property, law, and the making of the English novel

With its themes of marriages made, inheritances lost, estates restored, identities reclaimed, bankruptcies endured, and fortunes earned, the novel as a genre-in-the-making bespoke eighteenth-century England's ubiquitous concern with property and its regulation. This dissertation uses the concept of "property" to construct an alternative, print-based history of the early English novel. Recent re-evaluations of existing scholarship on the early English novel have resulted in calls for acknowledging the spatial as well as temporal aspects of realism, expanding the range of texts considered, attending to the ways marketing strategies created audiences, and recognizing that the quantitative "rise" of the novel occurred at the end of the eighteenth century and investigating why. My project furnishes a model that tackles these concerns.; Property's richness as a term generates the makings for a model ideal for generic theorizing and sociohistorical contextualizing. In delineating the roles property played in the making of the English novel, this dissertation treats the novel as a material object and sociohistorical form. To enable the generic project and the sociohistorical enterprise to work together methodologically, I focus on a device that straddles the world of printed texts and the world of cultural conversations rooted in history: the title of a text.; Titles are literally tied to property as identifying signs of texts. As signs of property, titles evidence ownership claims exercised upon a work. As abstracts of their works, titles present resumes of the "world-making" novels perform---they encapsulate the views that novels offered on how real and personal property should structure society. Chapter I examines the relationships between fictions in law and law in fiction, plot and property, and titles and copyright law. The second chapter traces the evolution of the title as a practice. Demonstrating the cultural codes titles emit, Chapter III surveys keywords and personal names common to early novel titles and sketches their ideological significance. The fourth chapter provides readings of eighteenth-century novels to illustrate the kinds of property relations these texts envision, the expectations that their titular claims generate, and the ways these texts fulfill their titular claims.